1899 1999

T O M O R R O W & T O M O R R O W

The TCPAs first hundred years, and the next....

Acknowledgements s Written and researched by Dennis Hardy s The TCPA is grateful to National Grid for supporting this publication s Front cover Minutes of the first ever meeting of the Garden City Associaton s Photographs 7 9 11 13 15 17 18 23 Inset Sir Ebenezer Howard Inset Sir Raymond Unwin Inset Sir Montague Barlow Inset Lewis Silkin Inset David Hall Illustration by Clifford Harper Inset Ewart Culpin Sir Frederic Osborn

Commemoration booklet to mark a century of campaigning by the Town and Country Planning Association
June 1999

Contents

s The next hundred years s Who needs planning? s Tomorrow yesterday s Garden cities for tomorrow s Into the regions s New towns, new era s Working with communities s Planning within our means s Spanning the globe s Balancing town and country s Charting a middle way s Planning for people and places in the 21st century

THE NEXT HUNDRED YEARS

What, people ask, is the secret of longevity? In the TCPAs case the answer is simple: it was born with a good idea that has stood the test of time, but more than that it has evolved in response to change. The infant Association was dedicated simply to seeing the creation of the worlds first garden city, as a model that others could follow. It was a small organisation, a prototype pressure group, and it would have seemed inconceivable to its founder members that it would still be alive and well one hundred years on. Is it any less conceivable that members will gather to celebrate the next centenary in 2099? Let us imagine the scene. Celebration dinners (an organic rather than genetically modified menu, of course) are still in vogue, but black ties are very much a thing of the past. Devolution (for which the TCPA long campaigned) is now taken for granted, and the Association itself has become a federal structure with an English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish centre. The big change, though, is that there is now a European centre, too, based in Budapest. Members from these various centres gather for the occasion, but many more are present through interactive screens in their own homes. The name of the organisation was changed early in the century, to reflect the importance of virtual as well as real space in peoples lives: it is now known as the Association for Cyber and Real Environments. Remarkably, in spite of the many conceptual changes, people still hanker after a good physical setting for their various activities, and they value social contact with neighbours and friends. At the centenary event, a faded copy of the original garden city book, dating back to 1898, is brought out of its wrappers and a reading of key sections evokes an appreciative response from the audience. Its words still strike a resonance, even amongst people who regularly enjoy trips in outer space. Some things have enduring qualities. There is a celebration of the various achievements of the second century, and a reminder of what happened in the first. Amongst the former, the Hungarian Convener speaks of the niche that the Association occupies, unique in its promotion of a holistic approach to the European environment. She reminds members of its influential work in making sustainability a part and parcel of everyones lives, and of its lobbying for an integrated planning system throughout Europe. The Association can take particular pride in having contributed to the mid-century renaissance of public transport, and in having helped to revive the forgotten art of walking. Sociable Cities, a concept coined at the end of the previous century, are now the norm, with settlement clusters and rapid transport links throughout the continent. And, thanks to intense lobbying for a complete re-think of farming, the countryside is once again teeming with wildlife. It has been a century of achievement, she concludes. And now, what can we say about the century to come? Will our successors, she asks, be gathering in 2199 to celebrate another hundred years of the Association?

Throughout its history, the Association has continually stressed the importance of effective planning in Britain. It is a tribute to the organisation that the ideals which shaped its vision are still relevant to planning today. The Prime Minister, The Rt Hon. Tony Blair At the beginning of the twentieth century two great new inventions took form before our eyes: the aeroplane and the Garden City, both harbingers of a new age: the first gave man wings and the second promised him a better dwelling-place when he came down to earth. (Lewis Mumford, 1946) It was all very puzzling. Was Jarrow still in England or not? Had we exiled Lancashire and the North-East coast? Were we no longer on speaking terms with cotton weavers and miners and platers and riveters? Why had nothing been done about these decaying towns and their workless people? Was everybody waiting for a miracle to happen? Why has there been no plan for these areas, these people? (J.B Priestley, 1934) Howards famous statement of advantages and disadvantages [of town and country, originally expressed in his diagram of the Three Magnets] can be rephrased for the conditions of the 1990s. The town has been sanitised and the country has been given urban technology, but both still suffer problems; and, still, towns set in the country offer an optimal lifestyle. (Peter Hall and Colin Ward, 1998) ...a Garden City, fresh and fair, When Work and Thought and Rest may ply their powers, And joy go hand in hand with Brotherhood. (Rev. Canon Rawnsley, 1905)

After the War much of Britain will be rebuilt. Shall this be done on the old lines, or can we do it in such a way as to give living space for all and the physical framework for a higher state of civilisation? (TCPA Annual Report, 1942)

WHO NEEDS PLANNING?

At the heart of the Associations work, past and almost certainly future, is a tireless commitment to achieve a rational and humane system of town and country planning. That which exists now has had to be fought for every inch of the way, and the past hundred years is a record of a sustained campaign. It all started when a shorthand clerk and inventor, Ebenezer Howard, produced a scheme for the formation of garden cities. Far from there being a well-oiled planning system in place to deal with this, there was at the time little more than a system of bye-laws. But Howard was undaunted, and within a decade the Garden City Association, formed in 1899 to promote the idea, had become the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association. In broadening its scope to promote town planning as well as garden cities, it was already acknowledging that there would be little progress of one without the other. As such, it became the first pressure group for planning, and predates the formation in 1914 of the then Town Planning Institute. Although the first planning legislation was introduced in 1909, it all remained relatively ineffective until the question of land values and compensation was tackled at the end of the Second World War. The TCPA (as it was renamed in 1941) was active in campaigning for this, and no-one more so within it than the indefatigable Frederic Osborn. Particularly towards the end of the 1930s and in the ensuing war years he put effective planning legislation at the top of the Associations agenda. The postwar record of the TCPA in keeping planning constantly within its sights is exemplary. There have been setbacks as well as advances, but nothing has gone unnoticed. It is fitting that its centenary year is a time of advance. Regional planning, strategic plans for new housing, countryside access and protection, and public transport integration are all very much back on the political agenda. And as the pages of the Associations journal Town & Country Planning show, debate on all of these is as lively as ever. Although planning still has to celebrate its own centenary, there is no doubting its continuing importance in the century to come. As the vagaries of unregulated global markets have recently shown, a degree of guidance and control will always be necessary. Greater competition for diminishing resources - land, water, minerals, wilderness - will call for more co-operation and better management. Planning, in one form or another, is most certainly here to stay.

At the beginning of the twentieth century two great new inventions took form before our eyes: the aeroplane and the Garden City, both harbingers of a new age: the first gave man wings and the second promised him a better dwelling-place when he came down to earth. (Lewis Mumford, 1946)

TOMORROW YESTERDAY

As the end of the nineteenth century approached, Britain led the world as an industrial nation. But its cities bore the grimy marks of more than a hundred years of industrialisation and rapid growth, with much of the population experiencing bad housing and unhealthy conditions. As the British Army was soon to discover when it tried to recruit able-bodied men to fight in the Boer War, the average person was in poor shape. Nor were conditions much better in the countryside, where, in the face of cheap food from overseas, the effects of a depressed market had added to the plight of the landless labourer. Most reformers tackled one problem or the other, with schemes for either the city or the countryside. But in 1898 the little-known Parliamentary reporter, Ebenezer Howard, flouted convention with a plan to address both sets of problems in one. His solution, the garden city, was explained in a small book that sold for just one shilling as a paperback, but in terms of its real worth was to be one of the most influential works of the twentieth century. In To-morrow: a peaceful path to real reform, Howard argued that the building of garden cities - new settlements with a surrounding agricultural belt - would draw together the best features of both town and country, while eliminating the worst. People and jobs would be encouraged to move to the more spacious environment of the garden cities, and land values in the overcrowded conurbations would thereby fall, thus making possible their redevelopment at lower densities. Howards ideal plan was for an estate of 6000 acres to be bought at farmland prices, upon 1000 acres of which would be built a garden city, leaving the rest as a surrounding agricultural belt. Everything would be zoned, with housing in a clean environment away from the industrial zone. Tree-lined avenues and boulevards would separate one zone from another. In the very centre, there would be a celebration of civic values: an ornamental garden surrounded by the main public buildings, and then a park and Crystal Palace to enclose a ring of shops and exhibitions. The population would be limited to about 30,000, after which a new garden city would be formed, and then another, so that eventually there would be a linked cluster of cities against a green backcloth. The value of the land would increase over time, to the benefit of the community. It was a simple idea, and, promoted vigorously by Howard himself and fellow campaigners, it led in the following year to the formation of the Garden City Association (which later became the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association, and subsequently the Town and Country Planning Association). Its main task was to get the first garden city built, and to use that pour encourager les autres.

...a Garden City, fresh and fair, When Work and Thought and Rest may ply their powers, And joy go hand in hand with Brotherhood. (Rev. Canon Rawnsley, 1905)

GARDEN CITIES FOR TOMORROW

It was one thing to sketch out some ideas in a book, and quite another to put them into practice. Where would the money come from to build garden cities, how would they be organised, and what would they actually look like? Was it all to be just another utopian pipe-dream, or would it actually happen? In spite of the gloomy predictions of his publisher, Howards book sold well, and in 1902 a new edition was produced with the unambiguous title, Garden Cities of Tomorrow. By then the building of the first garden city was very much on the cards. Partly this was due to some energetic campaigning by Howard and his followers. But that alone was not enough. Behind the scenes, the businessmen gathered (and, indeed, they were all men at that stage), led by a London lawyer, Ralph Neville. As Chairman of the Garden City Association, Neville promptly set about appointing a full-time Secretary, Thomas Adams (who later became a leading town planner in his own right). As well as altruism these new converts to the garden city idea knew that it made sound business sense to provide workers with healthy conditions. While Howard provided the vision the businessmen spoke their own language of share issues and trust formation. The First Garden City Pioneer Company was formed in July 1902 and the search was on for somewhere to locate the first garden city. Dozens of sites were considered, but in the end the choice was some 4000 acres of neglected farmland in north Hertfordshire, secured in the following year for 40 per acre. Enormous interest was aroused, and visitors trudged through the mud to see for themselves where the New Jerusalem was to be built. Two outstanding architects, Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker, were commissioned to turn Howards vision into three-dimensional reality, and Letchworth Garden City was the outcome. It grew slowly at the start, and some of Howards cherished aims were lost - for instance, he wanted the land to be owned by the community - but even without these it proved to be an attractive place, socially as well as environmentally, in which to live and work. Letchworth was intended to be the first of many, but not until after the First World War was Howard able to launch a second project. In spite of a desperate housing shortage, and the promise of homes fit for returning heroes, governments were still unwilling to get too involved themselves. So in 1919, Howard, having failed to persuade Lord Salisbury to part with any of his land, saw an advertisement for the auction of part of Lord Desboroughs estate at Welwyn. He made a successful bid for the land without even the money to pay for the deposit, which then had to be hastily borrowed from rich business friends. Thus was the second garden city born.

It was all very puzzling. Was Jarrow still in England or not? Had we exiled Lancashire and the North-East coast? Were we no longer on speaking terms with cotton weavers and miners and platers and riveters? Why had nothing been done about these decaying towns and their workless people? Was everybody waiting for a miracle to happen? Why has there been no plan for these areas, these people? (J.B Priestley, 1934)

INTO THE REGIONS

In envisaging clusters of garden cities, linked by good public transport and with access to higher-level facilities, Howard had himself recognised that it was no good simply planning individual settlements. But it was his fellow campaigner and successor as garden city champion, F.J. Osborn, who was later to take it all a stage further, into the new arena of regional planning. Osborn is a key figure in the TCPA annals (arguably the most important of all), whose involvement started as a housing official at Letchworth and went on to see him leading the Associations campaign. Although he was to be disappointed by the Governments response after the First World War, Osborn was always ready to put more trust than Howard in the State as the main agent of planning. Little progress was made until the 1930s, when mass unemployment called for radical solutions. Osborn was foremost amongst those who argued that the crisis would not be overcome without official intervention. It was also, he saw, an unprecedented opportunity to advance the cause of the Association. While much of the country was in a state of depression, southern England was still prospering; it simply didnt make sense. Why not, instead of leaving things as they were, give the ailing regions a boost and put a limit to some of the growth in the south? For a nation wedded to market capitalism, this kind of thinking was very much at the cutting edge. But, with traditional approaches failing to relieve unemployment, the government was edged inexorably into the planning arena. Successive reports in the early 1930s urged more direct intervention, although it was not until the formation of a Royal Commission in 1937, to investigate the distribution of the industrial population, that things really started to move. The outcome of the Royal Commission, the Barlow Report, broke new ground in calling for a new regime of national planning. Osborn would have liked the proposals to have gone further, with a more explicit lead on a framework for growth and containment, and details of a new agency to build garden cities and satellite towns. But he welcomed the report as an important step forward, a vindication of the work of the Association and an endorsement of his role personally. While the Commission was deliberating, Osborn worked overtime to ensure that the Associations arguments were heard, and there is clear evidence that he had an important impact on the outcome.

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NEW TOWNS, NEW ERA

I think that I personally have been a decisive factor in the evolution of the new towns policy and that this evolution is extremely important historically. I mean no less than without my fanatical conviction and persistent work in writing, lecturing and especially lobbying, the New Towns Act of 1946 would not have come about. (F.J. Osborn, reflecting on his role)

In spite of four decades of campaigning, by the end of the 1930s Letchworth and Welwyn were still the only garden cities to have been built. But much valuable work had been done besides that: the arguments for town and country planning had been forcefully put, and to this was added the case for government involvement in the regions. By the time of the Second World War some important seeds had been sown. During the war some of these seeds bore shoots of growth. Encouraged by the good work that was achieved to support the war effort, even sceptics could see the benefits of more government intervention. If it worked then, why not in peacetime too? So, with opposition at last falling away, an unexpected consensus formed around the idea of the State as the great provider: for health, welfare, education and even jobs. Osborn lost no time in re-launching the Associations campaign. With planning now in the ascendancy, he raised the stakes: yes, there should be a comprehensive system of town and country planning, but why not also a nationwide network of new towns? As many as five million people could be relocated in this way. There was little point in simply lobbying for the odd garden city now that the State was in the arena. Remarkably, the idea of new towns caught on, although not to the extent that Osborn wanted. First there came Patrick Abercrombies Greater London Plan, which offered a novel template of containment and planned overspill; with inner city redevelopment, a surrounding green belt and new towns beyond as the essential components. Then, with the election of the postwar Labour Government, the first BBC Chairman, Lord Reith, was summoned to chair a departmental committee to assess the feasibility of new towns. Less than ten months after its first meeting, the 1946 New Towns Act had reached the statute book and land for the first new town had been designated at Stevenage. The fact that this legislation was to sail through, with support from both sides of the House, was very much the result of the Associations thorough research and lobbying, and particularly the efforts of Frederic Osborn. Over the next three years there were further designations around London and elsewhere, at places such as Crawley and Hemel Hempstead, Peterlee and East Kilbride. Second and third generations of new towns were to follow, until the programme was wound down in the 1980s. By then, more than 1.4 million people had been resettled in this way. And, at the end of the 1990s, with the hunt on for more land to meet the projected increase in households, the Association is again campaigning for new settlements as one of the means of meeting housing need. Throughout this postwar period the Association has coupled its campaigning for new towns with opposition to high-rise and undesirably high-density housing.

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WORKING WITH COMMUNITIES

If the aim of environmental education is not to make children the masters of their environment, what else can it be for? (Colin Ward, 1978)

With the introduction of the Welfare State and a comprehensive system of planning in the postwar period, the hope was that what earlier reformers had called the urban problem would at last disappear. But that proved to be wishful thinking, and by the 1960s it had to be admitted that it was still there, albeit now under the rubric of the inner city. The TCPA was quick to see its longstanding connection to the issues; it was, after all, the urban problem that had originally impelled Howard to find a solution. So the spotlight was once again focused on related issues of poverty, bad housing, congestion and unemployment. And, with people at the heart of all of these, thats where efforts were directed. Far from being simply a question of importing solutions, the key to revival had to be found in the communities themselves. As a result, helping communities to help themselves - popularly known as bottom up planning - took on a growing importance for the Association. Initiated by the new Director, David Hall, some ground-making projects emerged, including environmental education and planning aid. Amidst growing interest in the new concept of public participation, an education unit was formed and two former teachers, Colin Ward and Tony Fyson, were appointed to run it. Their work attracted enormous interest, and the project magazine, the Bulletin of Environmental Education, better known as BEE, won the interest of teachers, the media and children alike. It was a high-profile, high-intensity project that is still recalled with affection and admiration for pointing to new ways of environmental understanding. A second progeny of this period was planning aid, described at the time as the planning equivalent of legal aid, but aimed primarily to help communities fight their case rather than individuals. It was a reaction to the wholesale destruction of neighbourhoods in the 1960s, ostensibly in the cause of good planning, and a precursor to greater public participation. At the end of 1972, a young planner was appointed to lead the new unit: his name, David Lock. Working alongside Colin Ward, Tony Fyson and David Hall, it was a golden era for the Association, its radical projects very much capturing the mood of the moment.

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The Associations main priority today is to promote its concept of environmental planning, as a contribution towards achieving sustainable development. The TCPA is not a single issue organisation: it occupies a unique niche, overlapping with those involved in the development industry, the environmental movement, and those concerned with social responsibility. (TCPA, 1998)

PLANNING WITHIN OUR MEANS

Another way in which the TCPA has diversified its activities is through embracing the cause of sustainability. In its pioneering days this was not seen as an issue; the fact is that the garden city was in itself a model of this. Self-contained for its own employment, with most parts within walking distance, and surrounded by an agricultural belt to assure a supply of fresh food, there was a comfortable balance with the environment. The postwar new towns were larger than garden cities, but still retained the aim of providing a largely self-contained environment. Towards the end of the present century, however, this amenable arrangement had rarely been achieved. Moreover, resources were being squandered through wasteful uses of energy and the insatiable appetite of a global economy. Partly alerted by its active planning aid service, the Association began to focus increasing attention on key issues such as nuclear power, motorway building and airport developments, and on what it saw as the heavy bias of the public inquiry process in favour of public bodies proposing such developments. Inevitably in the 1980s and 1990s this experience caused sustainability to move up the TCPA agenda to assume a key role in contemporary campaigns. We have to plan, it is argued, to live within our means, and we have to use and manage resources safely. One important initiative was to undertake a study project, led by Professor Andrew Blowers, the results of which were published as Planning for a Sustainable Environment. Various experts took part in this, bringing to bear their own knowledge of how to green waste disposal and transport, building and business. All were agreed that, to be effective, the various strands had to be brought together. Sustainable development is an integrating concept: it is about local and global, short and long term, environment and development. True to the TCPA tradition, the report concluded on a practical note, showing how it could all be made to happen. Everyone - private as well as public agencies - with a responsibility for planning and management the environment should start with an Early Action Programme, designed to reverse harmful trends. And each programme should take account of five goals of sustainable development: to conserve resources, to balance built development with the natural environment, to protect environmental quality, to assure social equity, and to encourage participation as a key to changing attitudes and values.

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I sometimes fear that if we are not careful we shall be outstripped by our Continental neighbours, because they have taken up the idea with such fervour and with such persistence. I must say with me the Empire stands first, and I should be sorry to find in this respect the Empire lagging behind. (Sir Ralph Neville, 1913)

SPANNING THE GLOBE

When Howards book was first published, he could not have imagined that it would be read in countries across the world and translated into different languages. But the fact is that from the outset overseas planners were attracted to the idea, and Letchworth was soon to be a popular venue for such visitors. The Association was active in arranging tours, as well as sending its own propagandists abroad. Armed with boxes of lantern slides, in the years before 1914 Ewart Culpin completed an extensive tour of North America while William Davidge and Charles Reade did the same in Australia and New Zealand. Members were enthusiastic when such missions were to outposts of the Empire, the Dominion beyond the Seas as it was referred to in reports, but doubts set in when the message was spread to industrial rivals. Foremost amongst these was Germany, whose planners had already pioneered garden suburb principles and were keen to adopt garden cities too. Other countries with close links in this early period included France, Belgium and Japan. Why should these countries, it was asked, benefit from an idea that was intended first and foremost to help British workers? The First World War put a temporary stop to some of this work, but in America and Australasia visits continued unabated and, nearer home, plans were laid for the postwar rebuilding of Belgium. Even with Germany, bonds forged amongst planners before the war were soon to be renewed. The British delegation was prominent in the international organisation originally formed in 1913 to promote garden cities, and (although not really one for pomp and ceremony) Howard served for some years as president of what was to become the International Garden Cities and Town Planning Federation, now the International Federation of Housing and Planning. Fresh impetus to the international movement came after 1946, with the start of the prestigious new towns programme. This was a major breakthrough, and planners travelled from far and wide to see what was in the making. The Association, as the custodian of the original idea, was a natural host for many of these visitors, and dozens of study tours were arranged, not only to the new towns but also to urban renewal and countryside projects. The TCPA continues to welcome overseas visitors and provide advice to institutions in other countries - most recently the South Korean government. When the United Nations held a major conference on human settlements in Vancouver in 1976, the TCPA ran seminars and an exhibition at a parallel forum for non-governmental organisations. This led to the Association becoming a founding member of the UN Committee on Human Settlements, now the Habitat International Coalition. On the eve of the new millennium, with globalisation a fact of modern life, this international dimension of the Associations work is more important than ever.

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Howards famous statement of advantages and disadvantages [of town and country, originally expressed in his diagram of the Three Magnets] can be rephrased for the conditions of the 1990s. The town has been sanitised and the country has been given urban technology, but both still suffer problems; and, still, towns set in the country offer an optimal lifestyle. (Peter Hall and Colin Ward, 1998)

BALANCING TOWN AND COUNTRY

In spite of all the changes that have taken place in living standards, modes of transport and leisure activities, planners still need to find a proper balance between town and country. This was at the heart of Howards ideas, and remains a key concern. Nothing better illustrates the original priority that Howard attached to it than his famous diagram of three magnets: town, country and the garden city. Both town and country had well-known benefits as well as drawbacks, and the garden city magnet would attract only the positive features from each. In this way it could offer all the advantages of urban and rural living, yet all in one place. Over the years the Association has campaigned hard to achieve this balance. In its early years, some members were ready to compromise by embracing the idea of garden suburbs. But to do so, argued the purists, would simply allow large cities to grow ever bigger. The vigil continued, and in the interwar period resistance to suburban sprawl became even keener. Osborn realised that the only way to counter sprawl was not as an isolated campaign but through regional planning, a cause that was taken up in the postwar period by another TCPA leader, Peter Self. In an influential book, Cities in Flood, Self showed how the various elements - urban renewal, suburban expansion, green belts and new towns - were inter-related. Only last year, two of the Associations modern stalwarts, Sir Peter Hall and Colin Ward, produced their own book, Sociable Cities, that is a worthy successor to the seminal work that started it all a hundred years ago. In the new volume, they show that people still prefer to live in settlements on a human scale, but with the advantage of access to a wide range of high-level services. The problem that Hall and Ward address is how to accommodate some four million additional households, in a way that people want and according to principles of sustainability. Their novel solution is to propose a modern version of Howards town-country magnet and social cities, in the form of a number of development corridors. Along these corridors would be clusters of settlement, all served by high-speed rail and other transport links, and with protected landscapes alongside. It all amounts to an exciting agenda for the twenty-first century, no less pressing than Howards was for the past one.

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The Association has been careful to avoid attachment to any one of the great political parties which contend for power in the State. It would have been fatal to the success of the movement, as it is, obviously to many others, if in the minds of the public it had been hitched to a party star - even of the greatest magnitude. No such star is safe enough in its course, or sure enough of its destiny, to pilot the movement to the haven we wish it to reach. (W.F. Hare, 1920)

CHARTING A MIDDLE WAY

The wheel has turned full circle. The third way, favoured by Howard a hundred years ago, is again in political vogue, representing a course between the extremes of too much control and too little, between collectivism and the market. In fact, except at times when the pendulum of public opinion swings too far in one direction or the other, it has for long been the safest ground for politicians. Howard was shrewd enough to realise this, distancing himself from extremists and launching the garden city to appeal to a wide range of interests. He had, he claimed, charted an even course between the Scylla of anarchy and the Charybdis of despotism. Howards approach was reflected in the work of the Garden City Association, which sought from the outset to win friends from across the political spectrum. Liberals found the voluntarist approach especially attractive, but Tories and Socialists to differing degrees also lent their support. So, too, did pressure groups with widely varying interests: vegetarians and cyclists, temperance reformers and Jewish immigrants, housing lobbyists and theosophists. Industrial philanthropists were also drawn to the cause, an important source of influence as well as funds. In a subsequent phase, Osborn shifted the ground from a preoccupation with garden cities to embrace first regional planning and then new towns, and in so doing he broadened the Associations appeal. By the time of the outbreak of the Second World War he sensed that the tide was at last beginning to turn in favour of planning, and he lost no time in assembling an extraordinary range of bodies under the common banner of a Planning Front. His initiative gave the TCPA a key role in the intense period of lobbying and ultimate success in terms of new legislation that followed. The TCPA has continued since then to work well with politicians of different persuasions, finding common ground in the simple message of improving the quality of our shared environment. But some phases have been more difficult than others, and none more so than the 1980s, when Thatcherism at its height threatened to sweep away the very foundations of planning. The task of the TCPA then was above all to weather the storm, to keep afloat the ideals it had fought so hard for since its inception. It was to be a worthwhile struggle, as in the present decade issues that were in danger of being lost are now very much back on the political agenda: not least of all new settlements, regional development and countryside planning.

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PLANNING FOR PEOPLE AND PLACES IN THE 21ST CENTURY

The TCPAs future is bright. Its immediate workload covers the whole range of its historical concerns and the fin de sicle atmosphere of hope and change provides a valuable opportunity for the TCPA to promote its ideas. As the implications of far-reaching social and demographic change for our towns and cities become increasingly clear, the TCPA is well placed to set out a new vision which delights in the opportunities this creates rather than fears the problems it will bring. No other organisation has more consistently set out a progressive agenda for urbane and equitable communities which tread lightly on the land. No other organisation is more possessed of the foresight necessary to secure this aim. And no other organisation is more qualified to respond responsibly to the genuine, legitimate and continuing desire of all members of our society to enjoy a decent home in a pleasant environment. But the TCPA has also been perennially concerned about the need to involve people in the decisions that affect them. The planning system is called upon to meet increasingly complex objectives - in terms of both its processes and its products - but at the same time as it is seen as slow, cumbersome and procedurally arcane. Furthermore, new forms of community will emerge in the coming century, and new participation processes must be designed to reflect this. It is vital that the TCPA continues its role in this debate. In a rapidly globalising society where the flow of information concerns us as much as the flow of people or goods, radical changes can be expected in the structure of our towns, cities and regions. Space may become more important to people, while place becomes less so. Will we, for example, travel less, or more? Will we live in an increasingly private future? Will our neighbours live thousands of miles away? Will we be in control of the destiny of our own towns and cities? These questions pose huge challenges for professionals concerned with the interaction of people and places. But the momentous achievements of the TCPA must surely inspire us with confidence that these challenges can be met with vigour and vision. The TCPAs mission is now to plan for people and places in the 21st century - and for all our tomorrows.

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1999
The TCPAs first hundred years, and the next....
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